LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 21, 2008 23:58 UTC (Sun) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
In reply to: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess by jengelh
Parent article: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Have you heard of this awesome thing called "distributions"? It's really new and fancy and solves all the dependency issues for you! It's your distro's job to integrate PA. You shouldn't install it manually yourself.

Lennart

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 22, 2008 0:26 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (4 responses)

Who said something about dependencies? I mean the *amount* of different sound libraries.
`mplayer -ao help` gives an initial list: arts, esd, pulse, jack, openal. And ogg123 depends on libao. That already makes six!

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 22, 2008 1:03 UTC (Mon) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link] (3 responses)

So you are complaining that we have so many incomaptible sound systems and all apps have to support them all?

That's what libsydney is supposed to fix.

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 22, 2008 2:26 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

Out of curiosity, what does libsydney fix that using the PA sink for ALSA
doesn't? Is it just the portability issue, or is there something more?

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 22, 2008 11:03 UTC (Mon) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]

ALSA is an API for hardware devices. That's root to a lot of problems you encounter when using the PA plugin for libasound. There are certain differences between hardware and virtual devices. Timing works differently, memory management as well.

The devil lies in the details. It's a lot of small issues that make compat difficult. In addition, some fundamental parts, like the reliance on the classic period-based playback model is a weakness that libsydney does not expose. Not exposing periods will greatly increase compat with glitch-free and with network setups. Finally, libsydney allows clients to set all kinds of properties for a stream that make it especially useful for desktop sound servers. (i.e. setting icons for a stream, and so on...)

But there are more things.

Lennart

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 22, 2008 22:06 UTC (Mon) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

...by introducing yet another library...? I can see a flaw in that :)